Home page > News > Press releases > Brussels, 6 June 2007 - Pro-smoking MEPs fail constituents after reversing (...)

Brussels, 6 June 2007 - Pro-smoking MEPs fail constituents after reversing ban

A straw poll has today (Wednesday, 6th June 2007) revealed that nearly half of respondent MEPs support the building of smoking rooms in the European Parliament’s buildings at the tax payers’ expense – according to the Smokefree Partnership (SFP)

Brussels, 6th June 2007: a straw poll has revealed that nearly half of respondent MEPs support the building of smoking rooms in the European Parliament’s buildings at the tax payers’ expense – according to the Smokefree Partnership (SFP).

Forty-five per cent of those questioned disagreed with the widely held belief that building smoking rooms provided no public health benefit and was a waste of tax payers’ money, and 17% had no opinion on the matter.

Asked whether they thought that all workplaces, including private offices, should be smoke free, an alarmingly high number of MEPs from the UK and Ireland (45%) disagreed.

Among MEPs in the new member states, 21% disagreed with smoke-free workplaces; this rose to 29% among the old EU states, excluding the UK and Ireland.